Plan It All, or Pivot Fast?
YouTube began as a dating website; Netflix used to mail people movie rentals on DVDs; Amazon started out selling books and now leads the world in cloud computing. Even the project management software juggernaut Slack began as a chat feature inside a video game. Where many large companies in the 20th century planned every step of their projects in advance, today expectations have shifted away from perfectly sequenced plans to faster pivots between products and even business models. Explore this shift, then discuss with your team: is it better to have a rigid map that might be wrong or no map at all and a very fast pair of shoes?
- Waterfall method | Command-Control | Toyota Production System | Chaos Engineering
- Agile Manifesto | Six Sigma | Sashimi Model | The Three Ways
- “The Phoenix Project” Philosophy
The 'waterfall' method — plan every step, then build in sequence — is named for a 1970 paper by Winston Royce. The twist: Royce drew that rigid model mainly to warn it was risky. In 2001, seventeen programmers met at a ski lodge and wrote the Agile Manifesto to replace it.
Key concepts
- Waterfall Versus Agile
- Two philosophies of building — 'waterfall' plans every phase up front and runs them in strict sequence (predictable but brittle); 'agile' works in small fast loops, adapting as it learns (flexible but less predictable).
- The Pivot
- A deliberate change of product or strategy based on what you've learned — Slack pivoting from a game to a chat tool, or Netflix from DVDs to streaming, shows that abandoning the original plan can be the whole success.
- Iteration Over Prediction
- In an uncertain world you can't fully plan the future, so you learn by doing — building, testing, adjusting — rather than betting everything on a forecast made before you knew anything.
- Embracing Failure
- Modern methods treat surfacing problems fast as a virtue — Toyota lets any worker stop the line to fix a defect; Chaos Engineering deliberately breaks systems to find weaknesses first.
What to know
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01
The biggest companies often won by abandoning their plans — YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, and Slack all became giants by pivoting away from what they started as, direct evidence that adaptability can matter more than getting the original plan right.
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